The article does have a point about attributed sales vs incremental sales - as a CFO (whether I qualify as the "hard-nosed" type in the article, I don't know), I'm bugged every time a marketing guy starts talking about how this campaign has been/will be "ROI-positive", and have had a few heated discussions on why this is mostly not demonstrable until you're willing to pull the plug (which you can do with more or less intelligence in order to minimize your risks).
On the other hand, while I do indeed believe that the "ROI" from Performance Advertising is something between just false and deliberately misleading, the bigger picture that I'm interested in is marketshare. Because when looking at market share, it's not a question of incrementality anymore, but whether you're growing slower/faster than your competitors, and your cost of doing that, and at what point you're OK to 'buy' marketshare, in the sense of losing money in the pursuit of growth, and how much. And then, OK, let's talk about ROI on that basis - most of the time, achieving this will indeed require tools from the Performance Adversiting toolbox, which allow you to conveniently track the amount of marketshare (i.e. sales) you bought.
On the other hand, while I do indeed believe that the "ROI" from Performance Advertising is something between just false and deliberately misleading, the bigger picture that I'm interested in is marketshare. Because when looking at market share, it's not a question of incrementality anymore, but whether you're growing slower/faster than your competitors, and your cost of doing that, and at what point you're OK to 'buy' marketshare, in the sense of losing money in the pursuit of growth, and how much. And then, OK, let's talk about ROI on that basis - most of the time, achieving this will indeed require tools from the Performance Adversiting toolbox, which allow you to conveniently track the amount of marketshare (i.e. sales) you bought.